Maybe the President Should Just Drop the Mic at the Podium Tonight

In the fall of 2009, President Barack Obama gave a speech about healthcare. The country had come through the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. The country had come through the worst political calamity since the presidency of James Buchanan. He had been elected because most of the country wanted to be part of the recovery from those twin debacles. Earlier that year, just after he'd been inaugurated, the president seemed to be speaking to that desire in his first State of the Union address.

Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it's time to try something new. Let's invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let's meet our responsibility to the citizens who sent us here. Let's try common sense, a novel concept.

But there was a danger in Obama's promise because it seemed to grant the country absolution without penance. As a cradle Catholic, I learned from the very first day of catechism that you cannot have the former without the latter, and the American capacity for doing penance for its political and social transgressions has been notably limited down through the years. Mostly, America and its leaders would prefer not to know about their transgressions or, if they must confront them, they would prefer to fob them off on someone else. So, in September, it was in that vein that a South Carolina congressman named Joe Wilson responded to the president's appeal for a bipartisan healthcare reform law by yelling, "You lie!" from his seat in the House chamber.

Subsequently, here's what happened. In 2010, when the American people elected the worst Congress in the history of the republic, Joe Wilson won re-election with 53 percent of the vote. In 2012, when the president got elected, Joe Wilson won re-election with 93 percent of the vote and no Democrat even challenged him on the ballot. In 2014, when the American people defied the odds and elected a Congress that actually was worse than the one they'd elected four years earlier, Joe Wilson won re-election with 62 percent of the vote, but at least he had some opposition that time around.

Subsequently, here's what also happened. In 2010, the Supreme Court decided the case of Citizens United v. FEC that demolished a century's worth of clean campaign laws at both the state and federal levels. In 2012, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act—the healthcare reform law that had emerged from the congressional debate that had begun with Joe Wilson's outburst—but it did so in such a way that states could opt out of the Medicaid expansion that was central to the law's outreach to poor Americans. States with Republican governors promptly did that, and then blamed the law and the president for what resulted. In 2013, the Supreme Court essentially gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Republican state legislatures thereupon threw up as many barriers to minority participation as they could think of. And did I mention that Joe Wilson got re-elected in 2014 with 62 percent of the vote? Yeah, I thought I did.

This is not even to mention the deep—and publicly expressed—commitment by the Republican congressional caucuses to stymie the president's agenda no matter what the cost to the country and its people: the sixty-odd attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act; the unprecedentedly promiscuous use of legislative choke-points like the filibuster and the anonymous hold; and the essential disrespect for the office of the president and the person elected to it twice, which was first given voice by Joe Wilson.

Despite all of that, here in 2016, the Affordable Care Act is still law, as is marriage equality, and so is the right to be gay and a soldier. Wall Street is still regulated better than it was in 2008. The president has moved the country further toward a policy to combat the climate crisis than anyone thought he could. He has moved boldly—and alone—on the issue of this country's insane attachment to its firearms. And he has redefined for all time the concept of a lame-duck president as a president with no more fcks to give. As Michael Grunwald shrewdly points out, if you listen to the Republicans on the campaign trail, they mostly complain about all the stuff that the president has managed to accomplish.

He has had to be more of a wartime president than he wanted to be. The drone war—and its consequences in both the short and the long term—are his alone. Sooner or later, some of the kids he's sending back to Central America are going to end up dead, and that will be on him, too. The surveillance state is still alive and well in the United States and Edward Snowden is still alive and well in Moscow. He can't close the prison at Guantanamo because Congress won't give him the money to do it.

He has been as progressive a president as our stunted, money-drunk politics allows, and that's been enough. Has he disappointed me? Yes, which gives him something in common with every president of my lifetime. But, as far as I'm concerned, if the president were to stand up in the House chamber tonight and, in the course of delivering his final State of the Union, if he were to tell the Congress that the State of our Union is better than it was when he took office despite all the efforts of the congressional majority to make it worse, and if he were to explain to them that, no, he has no fcks to give about any of their sorry asses and he's going to go right back down Pennsylvania Avenue and go back to work, I would not blame him a bit. If he were to drop the mic behind the podium, that would be cool, too.

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